This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

In the current paper, we asked at what level in the speech planning process speakers retrieve stored syllables. There is evidence that syllable structure plays an essential role in the phonological encoding of words (e.g., online syllabification and phonological word formation). There is also evidence that syllables are retrieved as whole units.…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…

In two experiments, French speakers detected CV or CVC sequences at the beginning of dysyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. In both experiments. latencies were shorter to CV than to CVC targets and this effect of target length was generally smaller for CVC-CV than for CV-CV carriers. (Author/VWL)

Twenty-four children with dyslexia (aged 7;7 to 12;1) and twenty-four age-matched controls named pictures aloud while hearing nonsense syllables either phonologically related (i.e., part of) or unrelated to the target picture name. Compared with controls, dyslexics had slower reaction times overall and, for low frequency items, the degree of…

The role of prosodic breaks (PB) in the parsing of locally ambiguous noun phrases (NP) + verb (V) + NP + prepositional phrase (PP) was examined in four word-monitoring experiments. Results indicate that PBs can influence sentence parsing. The article discusses possible mechanisms in the framework of two models. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Notes that the primary use of sequence monitoring has been to determine which linguistic units are involved in word recognition and how these units might differ across languages. The task involves presenting subjects with targets either congruent or incongruent with a linguistic unit in the target-bearing item. The article focuses on the…

Reports language acquisition experiments with simple recurrent networks solving phoneme prediction in continuous phonemic data, which suggests the network output could function as a source for syllable boundary detection. The phoneme prediction network simulates the necessary "bootstrap" to discover syllabic segmentation in unsegmented…

Notes that, in Spanish, there is empirical support for the notion that, in visual word recognition, the syllables initially activate competing lexical candidates. Presents experiments intended to explore these inhibitory processes and discusses the applicability of the data to a dual-route model and the time course of syllabic processing. (55…

In-depth analysis of a large corpus of English and German beginning consonant and syllable stress errors revealed that claims regarding these errors can not be replicated for Spanish, leading to the development of hypotheses focusing on Spanish as a pre-final-stress and syllable-timed language. (38 references) (Author/CB)

Investigated the time course of activation of the mental representations of word meanings in a series of three cross-modal priming experiments. The study interprets the data with respect to both localist and distributed implementations of the cohort model. Results indicate that if early competition among simultaneously activated meanings exists,…

Examines semantic errors produced by normal and aphasic speakers on a picture naming test for their phonological similarity to the targets they replace. A second study examines phonological relationships within sets of semantically related words and shows there is no tendency for these words to share phonological characteristics. (35 references)…

Three experiments used the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. The results indicated that, when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. (41 references) (MDM)

Argues that cross-morpheme and cross-word syllabification in the WEAVER model of speech production point to the need to deal with flexibility of syllable membership and pose difficulty to a memory-based approach but not to WEAVER. The study reviews empirical support for the form of syllabification in WEAVER and reports an experiment on…

Investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. Results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model). (67 references)…